kirushik

Disclaimer: I am not a legal professional (in any jurisdiction), and this is not any form of an official advice. But I've happened to work as "engineer in licensing and copy activation" for one of the major FOSS vendors, and then being a licensing compliance officer in another large-ish FOSS project; and here are my 2¢:

You are indeed in violation of GPL2 when building on top of GPL2-licensed code and giving it a non-compatible license. And PPL is explicitly non-compatible, since it restricts the "four freedoms of FOSS" for some actors (as despicable as they might be), while GPL is explicitly restricting any form of judgement when providing the four freedoms.

On a more general note — I appreciate the spirit and the intention behind your licensing choice, but unfortunately in practice this would mean severe impediment for hokusai adoption. Like, it would be technically hard/impossible to include hokusai and derived works into any software packets distribution: they both technically and by policy are usually restricted to "clear, well-known licenses" (which typically means OSI/FSF-recognized ones), and it might not even be possible to express your licensing choice when putting the code up there. And who would pick a GUI toolkit to build with, when the resulting code can't even be published in the package repos of their Linux distro of choice?

On a more fundamental level (and I start feeling out of my depth here a little bit) — Creative Commons licenses and their derivatives are usually not a great fit for software code. Eg right here in the comments someone already mentioned that it's not clear what constitutes "use" of your codebase — and indeed, the text of your license mostly focuses on Reproduction, Distribution and Adaptation. If I build and html-based webapp on hokusai, run it on my own server, and you open the page — is this Distribution or Reproduction, for whom of us?

Even worse, if hokusai is being used in a startup which assigned shares (not options) to its founding engineers, but not to everyone — is it a "worker-owned business" or not? What about an exploitive business which frames itself as a coop/NGO/whatever, but frames it actual workers as contractors (Uber-style)? Legally it might pass the benchmark outlined in PPL, but in practice it might be even more exploitative than just hiring someone at the labor market rates. Same with an org which exploits unpaid interns or volunteers...

I'm curious if that's US vs Europe thing?

For me in Europe, Google Maps coverage quality can be best described by this personal anecdote. I used to live in Nürnberg, which is in top 10 German cities by population, and where are some major and well-recognized international companies are headquartered. Nürnberg has a subway system (U-Bahn) since 1980s, and it's significant enough: a few dozen stations over three lines (one is fully driverless, btw).

Google didn't have any representation of U-Banh in Nürnberg till at least 2017. I don't mean "wasn't supporting it in navigation and routing", I mean " stations weren't even marked and labelled on the general overview maps. And it's not like they didn't have the into: there was a widely-used user layer which added at least station labels. They just simply didn't care enough, and had other priorities.

In the meanwhile, the level of detail on OSM covered details as minor as every mailbox not only in Nürnberg, but in every small town around Frankonia (I used to participate in postcrossing and used this a lot from random places).

Yeah, and I failed to even find an option to open a local HTML file on mobile Firefox (for Android) just now.

That's a shame — things were definitely different in 2019 when I built the initial version; and mobile browsers were definitely a target I had in mind for the tool (especially when it comes to the recovery).

Instead of wrapping the existing tool into a mobile app, I'm thinking about standardizing the QR code format from the tool a bit more — so multiple, more task-specific recovering mobile apps would be possible. (Like, the one in your password manager detecting certain internal text formatting and importing the entries automatically and such).

Yeah, that's right, thanks for the pointer.

We probably shouldn't even bother recommending browser-specific offline modes; I've created an issue in the project's repo to reword that piece by the next release.

Hmmm, that's new; thanks for bringing this up.

Would it be too much to ask for you to open an issue in Github for this? Things I'd be interested in the most would be details about your environment: browser/version/platform and if this is reproducible in a "fresh" browser profile without any extensions added (or just a list of your extensions, if that's not too privacy-invasive for you).